Fake Folks

If you’ve ever wanted to make a name for yourself, you’re bound
to take some inspiration from the stories of people who took things one step
further and manufactured entire selves.

Fictional characters have been known to walk the earth, either when
allegedly real folks like you and me have taken on assumed identities, or
when whole people have been invented for one use or another. Of course,
there’s a long tradition of using pseudonyms or
noms de plume, so it will take something
exceptional to be worth a mention here.

Unanimously elected to the Bullshitters Hall of Fame on the first ballot
was a fellow who called himself
George Psalmanazar
(I don’t think anyone knows what his real name was). In the late
17th Century, George wandered around Europe pretending to
be a cannibal prince from the exotic orient. He made up
an alphabet
and lectured widely about the pagan practices and exotic wildlife of his
home nation, even teaching at Oxford on the subject. In 1704 he compiled
these observations into the book “An Historical and
Geographical Description of Formosa.”

When
Psalmanazar
died in 1763, his memoirs, in which he confessed to the decades-old hoax,
were published. His life was revealed to have been one long work of
amazing improvisational dramatic fiction.

How could he have pulled off such a complete ethnic imposture on the likes
of Oxford? Well, don’t say it is because people were stupid back in
the eighteenth century. In the twentieth century,
Grey Owl,
an Englishman who impersonated a native American for years, wrote
autobiographical books, lectured, and even visited the British royal family
to tell them stories about his life. His influential books are credited
with starting the conservation movement in Canada. He wasn’t found out
until shortly after his death in 1938.

WorldCom customers collectively shouted “I knew
it!” when they learned that the company’s
“vice president of customer service”
Thomas Barton
did not exist.

The internet service provider Prodigy also created a phony head of
“membership services” when communicating
with its customers. A former Prodigy employee writes to sniggle.net:

As Prodigy reps, we were told that Lee Nicholson “embodied the spirit
of Prodigy Membership Services,” or some such crap like that, and we
weren’t allowed to say that Lee truly didn’t exist (nor
identify his/her sex). Prodigy management didn’t want to admit Lee
was fake, but they did want to cover their buns, apparently! (And they
didn’t do this very well!) A number of years later, Lee met with an
untimely and undisclosed manner of death (death by irate Prodigy member,
perhaps?), to be replaced by someone equally fictitious, whose first name
was “Chris.” Yes, still going with those
neuter names! As a joke, one of the Membership Services managers had a
coffee can in her office with a coin-sized slot cut in the top and a piece
of paper taped to the side, with the words, “Lee Nicholson
Memorial Fund.” It is questionable as to whether or not she
actually received donations, since we were all in on the “joke.”

In 1817, a poor British lass named (perhaps) Mary Baker managed to pass
herself off as a shipwrecked
“Princess Caraboo”
of “Javasu,” with the help of a Portuguese
sailor who claimed to understand her invented language. The media
attention her act captured caused many jewelers and such to shower their
wares on her in hopes of impressing the royals of that fantasy land.

One of my favorite examples (although it perhaps deserves its own category)
is of a San Franciscan named
Joshua A. Norton
who, in 1859, declared himself to be
Emperor
of the United States (and Protector of Mexico). It appears to have been a
creative solution to being dead broke after some financial speculation had
soured. Astonishingly, and as a credit to his character, it worked like a
charm.

The Emperor’s visionary proclamations were printed up in the papers,
his self-issued currency
was often honored, he corresponded with other heads of state, and his
renown was such that tens of thousands of people turned out at his funeral.

Players who are inspired by Norton’s story might want to look into
Lord Buckley,
the swingingist cat that ever did deliver the scratch to the itch. He
encouraged people to storm the aristocracy by taking on titles that
reflected their actual nobility rather than their inheritance or ancestry.

The “multiple name” is a device that’s been
used successfully for several years now, particularly by the neoists. The
idea is that multiple people publish and/or act (and/or
shop)
under the same name, creating a (multiple) personality out of thin air.
Good examples include prolific graffiti artist Kilroy, Karen Eliot,
recidivist criminal John Doe, mathematician
Nicolas Bourbaki,
political whack-a-mole Simon Jester, filmmaker Allen Smithee,
Klaos Oldanburg,
Monty Cantsin and
Luther Blissett.

In 1952, the best-selling book The Search for
Bridey Murphy
told of a woman who, under hypnosis, channeled the personality of a Irish
woman from the previous century. (Well, so maybe under further
investigation she didn’t, so what?) The New Age wasn’t
invented in the 1970s, kids.

Steve K.D. Eichel, in order to expose slipshod credentialing organizations,
got his cat a Ph.D and proceeded to have it board-certified to practice
hypnotherapy. He built on these achievements to have the rat catcher
awarded diplomate status
by the American Psychotherapy Association in 2002.

The 19th Century reference titled Appleton’s
Cyclopedia of American Biography was hoaxed by a staffer who,
understimulated and paid by the column-inch,
invented
famous Americans and wrote biographies for them.

Literary types, already well-versed in the arts of creativity and fiction,
can be excused for wanting to take that extra step and fictionalize a
whole author. If you believe in your art, it seems a logical step to
take advantage of the fact that your reader has probably already suspended
disbelief about your identity even before the reading begins!

Of the odd schools of poetry that flourished in the early years of the
twentieth century, perhaps it is an oversight only the
Spectrists are mentioned here. But
if their hoax was only more obvious, it was also most curious and
surrounded itself with oddity.

James Norman Hall, author of Mutiny on the Bounty, invented the
poetical prodigy “Fern Gravel,” whose
inspired young musings were published as “Oh!
Millersville” to rave reviews in 1940.

In 1944, a literary magazine called Angry Penguins published a
series of poems by
Ern Malley,
a poet whose early death would have made
his amazing work
forever obscure had it not been unearthed by the magazine. The works were
then published elsewhere, and are today included in anthologies such as the
Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry. The poor editor of
Angry Penguins was prosecuted and convicted by an Australian
court when the poems were found to be obscene. Ah, but alas,
Ern Malley
was just a convincing invention of a couple of poets who wanted to play a
prank, and invented both Malley and his corpus in a single afternoon.
“Literary fashion,”
they noted, “can be so hypnotically
powerful that it can suspend the operation of critical
intelligence.”

These sort of literary inventions are becoming more and more popular,
it seems. The world of Australian letters was more recently rocked by
Ukranian author
Helen Demidenko,
who won literary awards for The Hand that Signed the Paper, but
who was later found to be Australian writer Helen Darville, and by Wanda
Koolmatrie, the eloquent aboriginal writer whose autobiography, My Own
Sweet Time, turned out to be a fictional work by Leon Carmen.
A feminist press printed Rahila Khan’sDown the Road, Worlds Away and then found out that the author,
supposedly “a young, female Muslim of Indian origin” was a
Church of England vicar named Toby Forward.

Not to let wordsmiths get all the credit, one Elizabeth Durack passed off
her paintings as the work of “Eddie Burrup,”
a nonexistant aboriginal artist. As the director of Flinders Art Museum
put it, the thousands of people who saw the “Native Title
Now” exhibition of aboriginal art became
“directly involved in the
deception.”

William Boyd and Karen Wright invented
Nat Tate
and foisted the ottabe-famous painter on the New York cultural elite. And
Paul Jordan Smith fooled art snobs with his faux
“disumbrationist movement” painter
“Pavel Jerdanowich.”

An international arts festival in São Paolo played unwitting host
to the “fictitious 57-year-old Austrian avant-garde artist”
Georg PaulThomann.

I’m sure to be leaving out many worthy entries in this
subcategory,
but I’ll wind up the list with
Araki Yasusada,
a survivor of Hiroshima whose poetry has been published in major journals
but who doesn’t appear to have ever walked this Earth, and Binjamin
Wilkomirski.

Wilkomirski
is a similarly fictional Holocaust survivor whose best-selling and
critically acclaimed
“memoir” of being a child in Nazi concentration camps,
Fragments, was the winner of the Jewish
Quarterly’s annual literary prize for non-fiction and the
Prix Memoire de la Shoah and was translated
into a dozen languages before being exposed as fiction (see also:
Martin Gray’s
For Those I Loved and
Jerzy Kosinski’s
The Painted Bird).

And then there was (or was there?) the best-selling author
J.T. LeRoy.

Moving away from the literary world and into the domain of celebrities,
Esquire magazine played off of the supermodel hypesteria by
inventing one from scratch, slapping her on the cover, and writing a
feature article about her as if everyone important already agreed she were
the most amazing up-and-coming new thing.
Allegra Coleman
(or the model who was photographed in her place for the hoax) apparantly
got quite a career boost from being invented (no surprise there).
Suck
magazine commented on the hoax in their typically witty way.

You could always count on
David Manning,
movie critic of the Ridgeville Press, to come up with a pithy
and encouraging summary of Columbia Pictures’ latest offering.
Imaginary friends say the darndest things.

As an April Fool’s prank in 1985, George Plimpton wrote an article for
Sports Illustrated about an up-and-coming baseball pitcher by
the name of Sidd Finch who utters koans, pitches barefoot, plays french
horn, and has a fastball that approaches 170 miles-per-hour.

Sometimes, though, Sports Illustrated is too impatient to wait
for April to come along. Like in the Fall of 2002, when they ran a story
about the completely concocted Uzbekistanian tennis starlet
Simonya Popova.

A web site that ranked high school football players for college recruiters
found that their information was being stolen and resold or redistributed.
But how to prove it... They invented a top prospect, one Montego Powers,
who quickly started being hunted down by recruiters from Georgia, Florida
and Florida State.

Operation Mincemeat
was a World War II British intelligence operation in which a
corpse was disguised as a member of the British military, handcuffed to a
briefcase full of secret documents, and allowed to wash up on the shore
where the Nazis would find it. The documents were misleading fakes, and
tricked the Nazis into defending the wrong beaches against invasion.

Word that Sgt. Dan Kennings had been killed
in Iraq crushed spirits in the Daily Egyptian newsroom. The
stocky, buzz-cut soldier befriended by students at the university newspaper
was dead, and the sergeant’s little girl — a precocious,
blond-haired child they’d grown to love — was now an orphan.

They all knew that Kodee Kennings’ mother had died when Kodee was
about 5. The little girl’s fears and frustrations about her father
being in harm’s way had
played out on the pages of the Daily Egyptian
for nearly two years, in gut-wrenching letters fraught with misspellings,
innocent observations and questions about why Daddy wasn’t there to
chase the monsters from under her bed.

It turns out Daddy didn’t exist. And neither did Kodee.

The original Kodee article
was a bit of a propaganda piece that demonized anti-war protesters for
scaring this poor little girl.